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When I bumped into Abram Thau at Metrix Createspace in Seattle's Capitol Hill, he showed me a few printed figurines, including a Storm Trooper (of the Star Wars variety), and I thought at first that he had printed them as duplicates of similar-sized commercial products. Not so: It turns out these are made-from-life, specifically from cos-players who have stood on Abram's human-suitable turntable (powered by a chicken rotisserie motor hooked to a 3-D printed pulley) while he scanned them in. Thau's apartment is practically shouting distance from Metrix, but that pulley was made on a large Deltabot filament printer in the corner of his living room. (A living room usefully cluttered with tools, bottles of resin, projectors in various states of repair, and more printed objects.) More interesting still, Thau's figurines are produced with a home-built resin printer. Resin is messier to work with than the filament feedstock of RepRap/Makerbot style printers (and the resin itself has a slight odor), but it allows different results. Overhanging pieces are possible without requiring elaborate support pieces built into the mesh, and the resulting product can be noticeably smoother than typical filament printing, though all 3-D printing techniques are getting better. Thau didn't buy one of the commercially available resin printers, though (like FormLabs's), but instead decided to build his own out of scavenged and off-the-shelf components. Budget concerns and improvisation rule the day (Thau is also a grad student, studying to be a middle school teacher): That means there's a book holding up the projector which is vital to curing the resin, and the printer's case is recycled from a previous one. The results look as good as the affordable commercial ones I've seen, and he's excited to teach others to make their own. Third-party resin makers and a robust market in used projectors mean that other hobbyists can follow his lead and turn their friends into figurines. (Alternate video link)

Tim:
Abram,
we are standing in your
apartment in Seattle, we’re about 200 feet, 300 feet from
Metrix Create Space makerspace down the street. There’s
something you’ve got here in your apartment that I want you to
talk with us about, can you give us a little tour?

Abram:
Great. So I have a 3D scanning
and printing setup that lately I’ve been taking to local area
conventions, getting whole body head to toe scans of cosplayers in
their very elaborate fancy homemade costumes and then using my resin
3D printer to make miniatures of them.

Tim:
Now most people who have
homemade 3D printers are using Makerbot, so using filament printers.

Abram:
Yeah.

Tim:
The fact you have a resin home
built is actually pretty interesting, can you talk about why you
chose that?

Abram:
I chose it because well, I
started out with one of those filament printers, classic filament,
melted down, use a hot glue gun essentially to lay it out. It just
wasn’t working well enough, the resolution wasn’t there,
it can’t handle tricky overhangs very well, and I tried for
months getting it to work well, and it wasn’t enough. So then
I said, “Let me look into making a resin printer” because
of much finer detail and much more forgiving of overhangs and you can
just do a whole lot more with it.

Tim:
Abetter
3D printer?

Abram:
Absolutely.

Tim:
Okay.

Abram:
So the printer is right over
here. The box and the general frame has been scavenged from another
design. And you see here a couple of motors, the build plate moves
down into the vat of resin, there’s a projector in the back
that fires an image up into in the underside of the tank of resin and
the image from the projector, here is the resin, the build plate
moves up, cures the next layer and eventually you end up with several
stacked layers, several thousand stack layers to make the full model.

Tim:
Now, in this case the
projector is actually curing the resin from the bottom.

Abram:
Yeah.

Tim:
And it’s moving up in
the build plate, that’s not the only option, so why are you
doing it that way?

Abram:
I’m doing bottom-up
style because the alternative is top down, we have the projector
above the vat of resin firing down into the build plate sinks into
your vat of resin, but in order to make a large model, you have to
have your tank of resin be as deep as you want the model. That means
having a few gallons of resin in a big vat at any given time. And
that’s A) a pain, and B) if your pigment in the resin starts to
settle, which it does over time, you will then have to dump out the
entire vat of resin to stir up and that’s a method you want to
play with.

Tim:
Resins aren’t that cheap
either.

Abram:
No, it’s much cheaper
than it was. I’m using MakerJuice resin.

Tim:
Okay.

Abram:
They’re run by Josh
Ellis, a great guy. It is anywhere between $45 and $55 a liter,
which isn’t cheap, but it’s on par with better quality
like filament plastic. Which is crazy, because a few years ago you
couldn’t get this type of resin for less than $300.

Tim:
But companies like Formlabs
have made this way different.

Abram:
Yeah. Formlabs, I mean, it’s
a great company and they make great resins, but it’s about 2.5
times of price of the stuff I’m using. So honestly if you’re
looking at a cost to benefit ratio compared to filament printer
you’re like, “Well, it’s really cool, but it’s
really expensive,” and I’m just trying to make things as
robust and cheap as possible.

Tim:
Talk about robust and cheap.
Let’s look at the side of your printer.

Abram:
Sure.

Tim:
And explain a little bit about
the hardware it takes and how different it is, if different, from
building a filament 3D printer?

Abram:
Absolutely. So in the back
where you can see a power supply with your basic 12 volt power and
right up front here is just a RAM port on an Arduino. So totally
stock basic 3D printing control technology. The only real difference
is that I’m actually running less of it than most people, your
normal 3D printer has somewhere around four motors XYZ controllers,
and then something for the extruder. This one only has two motors,
just one either side of the build plate to move it up and down. So
it’s actually less electronics and less hardware that way.

Tim:
Because all the deposition,
all the solidifying

Abram:
Is done by the projector.

Tim:
Very good.

Abram:
Yeah.

Tim:
Now, the control software that
you’re using when you actually print something, you are talking
about a standard SDL file.

Abram:
Yeah, it takes a standard SDL.
The software I’m using is an open source package called
Creation Workshop, it is under active development, which is really
nice. And it’s cool because there weren’t really any
good solutions, there are a couple of cobbled together packages of
different things that people were using, but this is the first really
good open source integrated solution. And yeah, it is loading your
SDL, your position on your virtual build plate, and it will do
settings the way that you do with any other printer, it slices and
you end up with your G-code that controls the actual motors. And then
a folder full of a couple of a thousand image files that it sends
like a slide show to the projector.

Tim:
So we talked about the actual
hardware over here but around that, let’s show the projector
and you have in a very official setup over here.

Abram:
Oh yeah. Super official.

Tim:
I think probably you have to
be the right kind of author.

Abram:
Absolutely.

Tim:
You got your projector here
that angles down and bounces off a mirror that is just inside that
plate. And that’s when it hits the plate, that’s when it
hits your resin, what sort of projection resolution do you need to
make a project like this work?

Abram:
Well, this is a 1024x768
projector because if you are going any less than that, your print
starts looking really blocky because, the resolution of your print is
whatever the resolution of your projector is, so with my setup my
build area is this big and at that size each pixel is 130 microns, so
0.13 mm wide.

Tim:
How
do you get these models into your system?

Abram:
So what I do is, I have a big
motorized turntable, and you stand on the turntable, I switch on the
motor and you do your action pose, it spins you around for about two
to three minutes, while I wave a 3D camera around you and it
generates the file in real time so I can see if you are coming out
well. Once it is done, it just outputs it in SDL.

Tim:
Can I take a look of your
camera and your rotisserie here?

Abram:
Of course. So,
over this way, this is the 3D camera, it’s very similar to a
Kinect and it just gathers visual and depth data and then the
software constructs it in real time into a 3D model.

Tim:
Let me have a close up look at
the camera there. It does look like a Kinect. What is the source of
this camera?

Abram:
This is made by Acer. It’s
exactly the same internals as a Kinect, just in a slightly smaller
body; and I had it mounted on a piece of OpenBeam here.

Tim:
Yeah, let’s see the end
of that, not that I really know what OpenBeam is.

Abram:
Sure.

Tim:
But it’s actually also
one of things that comes
from right
down the street, some sort of home based in Seattle, it’s a
reusable, repurposable machined building structure.

Abram:
It’s just really simple,
solid aluminum extrusion. It’s what I use to build the frames
of my printer, it’s really handy for building all sorts of
projects and like you said – it’s made by Terence Tam,
whose home base is right here in Metrix.

Tim:
Can you capture an entire
person, you have to move the camera on that stick?

Abram:
I do yeah, on that stick, okay. Well, the stick is thereto just
give me a grip, I mean to put a rubber grip on it but haven’t
got around to it. So basically you stand there on that turntable.

Tim:
Actually here.

Abram:
Yeah, here we are yeah, so
this is the same motor.

Tim:
Where does that motor come
from?

Abram:
That motor came from eBay,
very fancy, very official.

Tim:
What was it used for?

Abram:
That was a rotisserie oven
motor, so it was meant for spinning chickens around.

Tim:
Chicken or person?

Abram:
Yeah exactly. So we have a
bike tire inner tube as my transmission belt 3D printer pulley,
here’s the platform, you stand on here, I switch on the motor,
you spin around and I just move the camera basically, starting at
your feet and move all the way up till I’ve captured the whole
thing.

Tim:
One more thing Abram, which is
if someone is building a 3D printer and they’re considering a
resin base or a filament versus some other kind of printer, what is
the particular challenge or what challenges should they be aware of
when making a resin printer because you’ve obviously gone the
route that very few have.

Abram:
Yeah, mostly the big
challenge, is it is less mature. Filament printers have been around
for a handful of years now, so we’ve seen many, many iterations
of hardware and software and interactions of the two, so it’s
pretty stable. Like you can go on any 3D
printing forums
and ask a question, and have a dozen people say, “Oh, this is
how you solve your problem.” With resin printing it’s
getting there, but it is still a much younger technology and so a lot
of these problems like you can go online and find a basic schematic,
but if you run into problems there are far fewer people who are there
to help you through your problems and give you answers.

Tim:
Anything else you want people
to know about this project you got going here?

Abram:
Well, if you are in the
Seattle area and you want to see how you look like as a miniature,
stop by.

Fuck man! I'd pay a goodly amount of money for one I could plant at staff meetings. Perhaps it could come with an audio board that would sporadically spout out phrases like "Way to go, team!" and "I will reprioritize to make sure your issue is at the top of the list."

.... that somebody finally found a commercially viable application of 3D printing?...

No. There are already plenty of commercially viable applications and have been for years. Those who think otherwise lack both the imagination and the ability to use google to search for ways 3D printing is alreasy used.

A dozen years ago when I was at Align Technology, the room full of these things churning out InvisAlign molds were, I think, the most the 3d printer is working printers at any facility in the world. I haven't been there in awhile but as far as I know they're still made that way.

.... that somebody finally found a commercially viable application of 3D printing?...

How many people would be ready to pay for a decent-quality figurine of themselves? Especially so at a special event involving costumes.

Well, that was the subject of an episode of the Big Bang Theory, but to be honest, I think what's going to sell 3D printers is the ability to print sex toys that people are to embarrassed to buy at the store.

however, it's a pretty competitive field right now. but if you're buying the service, that's good...

the headline sucks big time though - they're not replicas - they're miniatures. "interview with some guy who did a homebrew resin printer of the projector variety" would have been a better headline. hell, it probably would have gotten more views as well due to not sounding like bullshit(I thought for a minute that someone had built a home br

Seriously. I can think of more than a handful of Larpers who would kill to have one of these set up before or after an event so we can have figures made of ourselves in costume. Maybe offer a 1-inch figure for DnD!

The poet Perce Besse Shelly played around with reanimation or making the dead come to life. Animal parts were normally used for people playing around with making the dead come to life but Shelly was wealthier than most poets and could probably get a freshly dead human corpse to apply the shock that made them twitch. His wife Mary Shelly who created the Frankenstein novel probably was using images she had seen first hand in experiments done by Shelly. The chances are that Perce Shelly was the real

I have been looking into this type of 3d printers and there are many others. Most not as reproducable as the standard reprap fdm printers. This is why i am currently designing the reprap petri that will be reproducable when the design is done. Right now it is in early prototype phase and does not work.

I just read your stuff here: http://forums.reprap.org/read.... [reprap.org]
Very cool! I'm looking forward to following your project. One thing I don't like about these is the cost of the DLP, it seems that whatever your save on the platform you have to spend on the DLP...

I suspect a mind like his is going to inspire a lot of young minds. It's also pretty obvious that he could choose from any of a number of lucrative career paths. A truly noble and heroic human. Too bad we can't print life sized fully working copies of him. Every middle school should have at least one.

I give this guy a 25% chance of lasting as a teacher. He's very technically capable, he's in grad school so he likely has significant student loan debt, and he doesn't appear to be exceedingly extroverted. Unfortunately most teaching positions don't require technical capability or involve technical challenges, they don't pay anywhere near what you need to cover those loan bills, and the key to success is the ability to redirect and manipulate unruly teenagers (and their hovering parents), which can be espec

Slashdot TV videos in the past have had audio panned to one side per mic and not corrected in post, horrible volume jumps between mics, etc. In general I'm conditioned to expect a painful experience from/.tv productions. This was one of the better produced ones.

There are a bunch of things that I think could use some major work. The inane/simplistic interview questions still continue and drive me up the wall. I don't want to complain too much on this point b